One way to cut through the noise is to look at the commonalities between the advice that many different highly successful people give (i.e., take the “intersection”), letting the noise and contradictions drop away. If many of them provide the same advice, we can be at least somewhat more confident that it generalizes. Having said that, we should nevertheless remain mindful of selection effects (affecting who we hear advice from), including survivorship bias.

With that in mind, here’s my attempt to “intersect” the repeated advice I’ve read or heard from many different highly successful people who come from a wide range of fields and life circumstances. I expand on each piece of advice by listing common themes I’ve heard around that advice (that I also largely agree with), and then I give a relevant quote.

Ten Repeated Pieces of Advice From Highly Successful People

1. You won’t automatically be happy when you reach your goals.

Achieving goals breeds new ones.

A terrible situation creates misery, but a good situation doesn’t imply you’ll be happy. Happiness takes inner work, and it benefits a lot from gratitude for whatever it is you already have. The good life is a journey, not a destination.

Quote: “Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn, or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.” – Denis Waitley

2. High levels of accomplishment almost always require hard work over a long time. “Overnight successes” are rare and are often misidentified. If you look closely, usually, the person was practicing for 5-20 years before they were an “overnight success.”

Always be looking for how you can do your work better, and focus on improving in those areas. Compounding improvement over a long period is how people become great at things.

Quote: “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” – Thomas Jefferson

3. Life is unpredictable. When young, people usually don’t know what they’re going to “do with their life.” That’s fine!

Life takes crazy, unexpected twists and turns. Plans are great, but you should expect to modify them. Be adaptable and on the lookout for great, unexpected opportunities.

Quote: “Sometimes, when you go looking for what you want, you run right into what you need.” – Wally Lamb

4. Don’t let fear stop you. Attempting hard things will bring stress, fear, and anxiety. 

If you avoid what you fear (more than is warranted by the level of danger), your potential will be curtailed. Learn to push through your fears to do stressful things that are valuable.

Quote: “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anaïs Nin

5. Choose who you spend time with wisely. Be thoughtful about who you are friends with, whether you spend enough quality time with your loved ones, etc.

Spending time with the wrong people will waste time or even sap potential. Make enough time for the people that matter most to you.

Quote: “You Are The Average Of The Five People You Spend The Most Time With” – Jim Rohn

6. Learn to say no. People will ask you many things from you. If you always say “yes,” it will drain energy & focus.

Say “yes” to your loved ones and to requests that are aligned with your deepest values. For others, consider if you realistically have the bandwidth to handle the request without taking away from your most important priorities. If not, give an authentic “no.”

When you’re starting out, it makes sense to say “yes” to more things. The more successful you become, the better you have to get at saying “no” – otherwise, your life will be dictated by other people’s demands.

Make choices based on your own values rather than based on what pleases or impresses others. Be your authentic self.

Quote: “Half of the troubles of this life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough.” – Josh Billings

7. Take care of your body. Exercise regularly, reduce sugar intake, eat healthy foods that make you feel good, make enough time for sleep, and avoid excessive alcohol/drugs.

Good health has ripple effects and will help you achieve your goals. Your body impacts your mind.

Quote: “The groundwork for all happiness is good health.” – Leigh Hunt

8. Take care of your mind. Meditate regularly (or find another practice that refreshes and resets you). Sleep enough. Seek treatment for mental health challenges.

Get out of relationships where people mistreat you. Have compassion for yourself, and treat yourself with kindness.

Know your limits, and keep stress within those limits. Take some time just to relax and have fun with no obligations. Take vacations.

Quote: “If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.” -Jack Kornfield

9. Expect to fail many times. That’s normal and expected. 

The key is to learn from every failure, pick yourself back up, and keep going. If you’re not willing to fail many times, you aren’t prepared to do hard things.

Quote: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas Edison

10. Leverage habits. Figure out what daily pattern works for you. 

Maybe it’s an hour of writing at 6 am, strong tea in the morning, a carefree walk in nature at noon, or jumping jacks in the early afternoon. Experiment to find what works well for you, and stick to it.

Quote: “First, forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not.” – Octavia Butler

This piece was first written on January 26, 2021, and first appeared on this site on October 14, 2022.

The high level components necessary for accomplishment in tennis are the same as they are in nearly every field. Accomplishment relies on the following factors:

1. Ambition. While it is possible to accomplish things that you don’t set out to achieve, when that occurs it is usually just due to luck. Setting something as your goal is the first step towards accomplishing it. If we have low ambitions, we are unlikely to achieve great things.
2. Talent. Most accomplishments require a certain starting level of skills relevant to the accomplishment. To be become a great singer, it helps to have good pitch. To be a great investor, it helps to have a personality that allows you to act calmly when others are afraid. While abilities can be honed with training, your current level of talent represents your starting point in the accomplishment race. If you start too far behind, even really good training may not get you to where you need to be.
3. Reasoning. The path towards almost every major accomplishment involves making difficult decisions. Which job should you take? Which helpful books should you read? Who should you make an effort to get to know? Which skills should you work to hone? Which training methods should you apply? The superpower of being able to reliably answer these kinds of questions will make your accomplishment much more likely. One very bad decision early on may lead you to failure.
4. Time. Most big accomplishments require a very large investment of time. You are not going to be able to invent a better type of microchip without first learning a lot about computers, electrical engineering, and materials science. This will take years.
5. Resources. These can be both physical (e.g. money) or social (e.g. knowing the right people to help you achieve your goal). If you have an incredible business idea, but don’t have the money to fund it, and can’t get in contact with someone who will fund it for you, you’re out of luck. A strong social network can make achievement much easier. It often takes the well-coordinated effort of many people to achieve great things. There may even be a person out there whose advice or help is exactly what you need for success. And sometimes involving others in our projects can make up for our own lack of talent, lack of money, or lack of time.

Any of these five factors can prevent you from accomplishing great things. If your goals are unambitious, your achievement will probably be low. If you are lacking in relevant talent, you’re unlikely to ever achieve great heights of ability. If your reasoning is poor, you’ll be likely to make bad decisions related to how to achieve your goals. If you don’t put enough time into achievement, you’ll probably not accomplish very much. And many goals require some money, or the help of others, and without either of these, your ambitions may not get off the ground.

Flipping this analysis around, we see that we need to make sure that we have these five factors in place if we are going to have the best chance of accomplishing what we hope to. Sure, we might get lucky, and not need them all. Maybe we’ll win the lotto and so won’t need to worry about physical resources anymore, or maybe our bad reasoning will happen to not harm our project. But if we want to maximize our chance of success, we should have sufficient ambition, talent, reasoning skills, time investment, and physical/social resources. Whichever of these is our weakest point is likely what we should focus on improving. We can consider how we can try to affect each of these factors:

1. Ambition may be hard to change. You simply may not care about accomplishing much. But reflecting on what you would like to complete before your die may make you realize that you do in fact care about achieving certain goals.
2. Your current level of talent is fixed, but you can make up for a lack of it by involving other people whose talents complement your own, and by reasoning about how to improve your skills and then investing sufficient time into doing so.
3. Reasoning can be honed with practice.
4. Time simply needs to be invested. But reasoning can help you make your time more productive and efficient, and involving others in your goals lets you pool your time with theirs. If at your current rate of time investment, your goals may take decades to achieve, you may need to start taking time away from something else.
5. If you don’t have the money or social network required to complete your goals, that may be solvable with further time investment. You may need to take a job to make the required money, and devote time to building new social contacts that are relevant to what you’d like to achieve. For instance, you can start introducing yourself to more people at places where those who are likely to be helpful are likely to be.

If you want to maximize your chance of accomplishing your goals, figure out which of these five factors is your weakest point, and fix it. Then, if necessary, repeat.

If one of your goals in life is to run a triathlon, and it is the day before the big race, you probably will feel excited. The day after the race is over, you will likely feel proud with a highly elevated mood. Months, and perhaps even years later, you will still probably feel good when you reflect on the fact that you completed the race. And yet, the fact that you ran that triathlon is very unlikely to impact your day-to-day mood long after the event. Most of us spend only a small percentage of our time reflecting on past memories and achievements, and even in moments of reflection the triathlon would represent just one of a great many possible things to reflect on. If you are lucky, the triathlon experience might have positive effects on your personality, increasing your confidence or perseverance, and give you a sense of accomplishment. All of these things are great. But you should also not expect the fact that you ran one two years ago to be determining how you feel on a day-to-day basis today, or to be making up for a life that currently lacks fulfillment. In other words, accomplishments are great, and you should strive for them. But you also shouldn’t expect them to benefit you that much on your typical days. But typical days are the content of most of your existence. Typical days matter most in terms of your average happiness because they are so abundant.

So in addition to thinking about the things you’d like to accomplish in your life, it can be helpful to also ask yourself:

• What would my ideal, ordinary week be like?

Ideal, in the sense that it would reflect a life that would make you happy (both helping you maintain a significantly positive average mood, keeping you feeling fulfilled, and including meaningful connections). Ordinary, in the sense that it is the sort of thing that you could actually repeat week after week for years. So base jumping is out, unless you don’t plan on surviving for very long. Eating $200 tasting menus every night is out, unless you plan on making a large sum of money first (and anyway, they would quickly become boring). And going on a roller coaster every week is out, because after six months of that most of the thrill would be gone (unless you are truly a roller coaster aficionado). To construct your ideal ordinary week, it may help to ask yourself questions like:

• What living situation would help keep me in a good mood?
• What activities give me a sense of fulfillment or purpose?
• What excites me that would still excite me if I did it weekly for years?
• What job would fit into this ideal week, providing the income to support this lifestyle while simultaneously adding to my positive mood and good feeling about life?

Don’t think in terms of achieving certain milestones, but rather in terms of how the hours in the week are spent. You can fill in these details about your ideal ordinary week with questions like:

• How much time would you spend watching TV per day? It may not be zero minutes, but your happiness is probably not maximized by watching more than an hour either.
• How much time would you spend reading or learning per day? What would you learn about and how would you go about learning it?
• How much time would you spend socializing? What sorts of people would you socialize with?
• How much time would you spend on hobbies? What might these hobbies be (making sure to choose things that wouldn’t grow boring over the years)?
• How much time would you spend doing altruistic things (keeping in mind that altruism increases both our sense of fulfillment and raises our mood, in addition to its direct benefits on the world)? Who would you be helping in this time?
• How many hours would you spend at work (keeping in mind that this job must support the lifestyle of your ideal week plus give you sufficient savings)? What would you want your hours spent at work to be like (being realistic about what you could get paid to do)? What sort of tasks would you be doing and what sort of people would you be working with that would be good for you, week to week?
• What would your romantic life be like? How would time with a romantic partner be spent?

Once you have determined what your ideal ordinary week would be like, consider how you can nudge your current life in that direction. What are you doing more of than would be your ideal, and what are you doing less of? Can you cut back on the former and increase the latter?

Milestones are important and worthwhile. But rather than thinking just in terms of what milestones you want to achieve in your life, think also about what you want your daily existence to consist of. Based on what you know about yourself, think about how you can fill your hours so that you regularly have a positive mood and a feeling of real satisfaction. Figure out what your ideal ordinary week would be like, and then ask yourself what you can change today to make your life more like that ideal.

Influences: Kenneth Chen (A Practical Guide to Defining Your Supergoals)